Polenth Blake's WERECOCKROACH

"Once this is over, I'm sure people'll want goot things to read. Distraction is good."

Personally, I'd be hitting the cute animal videos. It wasn't that I didn't like books, but you never know if a book will be good all the way through. A fun mystery has a weird rant about why women are all liars or that cute gay couple ends up being thrown in a meat grinder. That's not as comforting as watching cats sit in boxes.

 Rest assured, none of those terrible things happen in this novella, which is even more comforting and as fun as watching cats sit in boxes, especially if you understand that cockroaches are so much like cats that they spend a lot of time sort of comfortingly stroking each other with their antennae in their down time and, if something grody happens like being picked up by a disgusting yucky human being, they immediately freak out and need to clean themselves thoroughly to get rid of our cooties.*

Being as I am the kind of person who writes sonnet cycles about brand inspectors trying to manage small herds of cow-weres**, having at one stage of life kept a small family of Blaberus craniifer as pets in a college dorm room, and being also the kind of person who enjoys various portrayals of insects in literature, Polenth Blake's Werecockroach feels like a Christmas present from a complete stranger intended specifically for me. So of course right off the bat, I have to share my only complaint, and that is that Werecockroach isn't about 700 pages long. Good thing my beloved Clark Thomas Carleton wrote me another volume of his Antasy series, coming soon to a blog near you.

Werecockroach, at just 79 pages, is a light little whisp of a thing compared to the lit-chonks I tend to review on here, but its subject matter and wonderful cover of course made it a must whatever its length. And a lot gets packed into those 79 little pages; it is light in form rather than content.

We have but three characters to manage, but what characters they are. Rin is a agendered asexual aromantic person*** whose last residence burned to the ground before our story even gets going, who has managed to locate a new living situation in London, with two young men who strike Rin right away as rather unusual people in their own rights, though at first they merely come off as a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist and a roommate who is way more tolerant of the theorist's eccentricities than is quite usual in modern day London. And the flat they're willing to share with Rin is very small and tight, with narrow corridors and rooms into which a bare minimum of furniture just barely fits, but that's fine with Rin, who has few belongings to stash, now, anyway.

Before long Things Happen that would ordinarily be the entire focus of a big fat novel, but here just serve as a reason to drive our three new friends out of their overly cozy living quarters and out into the big weird world which quickly exposes, well, the title gives that bit away (which is why I'm keeping the Things That Happen secret). How Rin reacts to the discovery that makes this title make sense is not what you're expecting; nor is how a whole group new group of maybe-friends talk, which is 100% hilarious and was just what I needed this week as the last of this wretched year 2020 And Some Months dwindles and seems to be fixin' to drag the wretched year of 2020 And Some More Months in on a gust of apocalyptic winds here in Casper, WY, USA.

Suffice it to say that I feel like Polenth Blake is maybe my new best friend, or at least someone whose work I'm always going to be on the lookout for. Hiss!

*Yes, these are actual observations made once upon a time by Your Humble Blogger.

**That being, of course, a being that transforms from a bovine to a human at the full moon.

***Whom I imagined sounding exactly like Abigail from Unwell.